collect

ODK XForms are used to render forms in the Medic Collect Android app. These forms cannot use any CHT-specific XForm notations. All Medic Collect forms are processed as SMS (even when submitted over a wifi) therefore a corresponding JSON form with matching fields is used to interpret the incoming report.

Collect forms must be in the forms/collect folder to be processed by cht-conf’s convert-collect-forms and upload-collect-forms actions. Once uploaded to the server, they can be downloaded by the Medic Collect app. These forms can also be included in Medic Collect builds for users without a data connection to get forms.

XForms require a couple minor changes to be compatible with Medic Collect so that they can properly be received by a Medic instance. The changes can be done either manually in the XForm’s XML, or automatically with XLSForm forms using cht-conf.

Automatic changes with XLSForms

If using a XLSForm and using cht-conf to convert to XForm, the necessary fields will be automatically added to the resulting XForm. You can override the default prefix and separator by declaring sms_keyword and sms_separator respectively in the Settings tab.

Manual changes in XForm

Collect forms need prefix and delimiter values added to the XForm’s XML. This is done where the form ID is declared in the instance’s data model. For example, the following:

<instance>
   <data id="myform" >
   ...

becomes:

<instance>
   <data id="myform" prefix="J1!FORM_CODE!" delimiter="#">
   ...

Note that FORM_CODE should be replaced with the form code as defined in the JSON forms version of the form. If the form code is ABCD the prefix value would be J1!ABCD!, resulting in prefix="J1!ABCD!". In case you are curious, the J1 lets the CHT server know that version 1 of the JavaRosa parser should be used on the incoming SMS.